As she concluded her preordained encore, I despaired a little for myself and the task ahead of me, since the harmonic underpinnings of the work seemed remarkably evasive. She must have seen the concern on my face as she turned away from the piano to receive my reaction.

“Well, what do you say?” she asked, and as I fumbled for the words, Gail blurted out in horror, “You don’t like it. Oh, you can’t not like it! It only means the world to me—”

I cut her off. “Gail, it’s wonderful. I don’t know that I’m fully qualified to appraise it, but—I mean, I was expecting it to be something uniquely your own, but it’s . . .” My voice trailed off. “Gail, it’s not for everyone’s tastes. But it’s flat-out terrific.”

She hugged me and shrieked with delight. “I knew you’d hear it the way I hear it! I’ve been worried that it was only the judges and myself who could understand, that everybody else would say it was just a lot of racket—”

“Why, has anyone else heard it and disapproved?”

She rolled her eyes. “Oh, Toby, Ada—”

“Well, Toby Ackland strikes me as a jerk,” I said, “and you told me Adeline lost the competition to you. What would you expect her to say?”

“She pretended she wanted to learn from my style of writing, and I felt guilty about beating her, so I tried to be a good sport.” Gail frowned. “She made a big fuss about giving me the first draft of her piece for the competition—Self-Portrait, she called it—so I sort of had to let her play Swing. I should never have done that. And of course my mother and Russ, they don’t understand it at all, so when someone like you, someone I truly admire, says it’s wonderful—” She hugged me again with another cry of pleasure.

Her mother was in the doorway. “Gail, are you all right?” she asked, looking accusingly at me.

Gail let go of me. “He likes it, Mom. I mean, I knew he would, but until he said he did—” She whirled on me. “You’re not lying, are you? Oh what the hell, it doesn’t matter, you can’t take it back now.”

“Of course he likes it,” said Martha, who walked away but didn’t close the door behind her.

I asked Gail if I could look over the score. Her musical hand was much more precise than mine. That was a plus right there; I wouldn’t be spending my time trying to decipher what she’d composed.

“It doesn’t really voice naturally for big band instrumentation,” I began. “It’s not like there’s a lead melody with chord changes behind it.”